Etruscan temple found in Tuscania

The foundations of a previously unknown Etruscan temple have been found in Tuscania, an ancient city near Viterbo, about 60 miles northwest of Rome. The temple was discovered in the Etruscan necropolis of Sasso Pinzuto.

Associated with the Etruscan settlement on the adjacent Colle San Pietro, the necropolis consists of more than 120 tumulus and chamber tombs carved out of the volcanic tufa that date from the first half of the 7th century B.C. to the Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd century B.C.). It has been explored off and on since the 1830s, and many funerary offerings, mainly pottery vessels, have been unearthed.

Polychrome clay slabs dating to the second quarter of the 6th century B.C. decorated with molded reliefs depicting ceremonies and celebrations of the Etruscan elites have also been found, often broken and piled in the ditches surrounding burial mounds. Archaeologists have long thought the slabs were architectural features that once adorned cult buildings, but the remains of no such structures have been found. Until now.

Specifically, the tuffaceous opus quadratum foundations of a building with a rectangular plan, measuring 6.2 x 7.1 meters, oriented north-northeast and facing the access road to the urban area of Colle San Pietro, were discovered. Exploration of this building, located in a dominant position over the surrounding area, will enable the acquisition of information about funerary cults, characteristic of Tuscania in the Archaic period. It was probably a cult building, an oikos as it is called in technical terms, that is, the house of the deity (oikos in Greek, in fact, means “house”).

The building was found in a tongue of land just under 1,000 m² in size, housing at least three mounds with crepidines dug into the tufa and integrated in opus quadratum. North of the largest mound, with a diameter of more than ten meters, nine small pits in the tuff were intended for burials and cults: it is in this area of the excavation that the building was found.

The current excavation of the necropolis aims to deepen the knowledge of Etruscan Tuscania, focusing on how the interplay of monumental architecture and smaller burials explain the social structure of the settlement’s earliest periods (Orientalizing and Archaic, 7th-5th centuries B.C.).

* This article was originally published here